Things I will accomplish before the big three-oh.

Daring Cooks do Cornmeal

It occurred to me yesterday that today was the reveal day for this month’s Daring Cooks challenge. I decided to take a look, assuming I wouldn’t have time to accomplish it. Imagine my surprise when I saw that the challenge was to make something with cornmeal! Since I love corn in every shape and variety, I always have cornmeal on hand, and since David has been wanting me to make him ho cakes, I thought I’d do something simple in that direction. I wasn’t very adventurous at all, but I did actually sort of cook, and I finished a challenge for the first time in a long long time.

Blog-checking lines: Rachael of pizzarossa was our August 2012 Daring Cook hostess and she challenged us to broaden our knowledge of cornmeal! Rachael provided us with some amazing recipes and encouraged us to hunt down other cornmeal recipes that we’d never tried before – opening our eyes to literally 100s of cuisines and 1000s of new-to-us recipes!

This recipe is so easy that I’m kind of embarrassed to call it a recipe. It’s corn-y comfort food that I make when I’m feeling lazy.

That’s where I stop the ingredients when I’m cooking for David. At this point, you could add green onions, chives, cheese, green chiles, ham, whatever you want, really. I just made these ones plain. Mix all your ingredients, then scoop out between 1/8 and 1/4 cup of batter onto a hot, oiled skillet or griddle. Fry until brown on both sides. Pretty easy, right? This is what you get:

I like them with maple syrup.

Speaking of sweet, I like my corn cakes to be sweet, like little, well, cakes. If I’m making them for me, I add 1/2 cup of sugar to the batter. Once you’ve done that, though, frying in little cakes can be sticky and problematic. I usually bake the mixture in a square glass 8×8 pan at 350 degrees for about half an hour, until it’s set. Then I eat my sweet corn pudding with a spoon. Like I said, it’s a lazy food.

So that’s a challenge done, and I think this even counts as a recipe made and photographed, although like I said, it’s barely a recipe. Enjoy your corn!

Welcome back to the challenges, Jill. Your corn cakes are gorgeous, so golden and fluffy! I can’t get creamed corn here – I’m guessing I could just stick a can of sweetcorn kernels in the blender, though. Definitely going to try these 🙂